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Saturday, 4 September 2010

How (not?) to sink without a trace

Jim Collins, having studied over many years the difference between good and great business undertakings, presented at this year’s Willow Creek Leadership Summit on the decline and fall of the great. He says “whether you prevail or not depends a lot more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.”

Remember Titanic? — the supposedly unsinkable is holed below the waterline and denies it; the cap’n carefully checks the lightbulbs, to avoid the uncomfortable truth that the whole ship could be going down. Meanwhile the passengers apply themselves to ballroom dancing, not finding things that float. Major functionaries begin to behave like minor functionaries, obsessing about how to protect the White Star Line’s property, when they ought to be inspiring and resourcing people to find effective means of survival. As the ship’s prow rotates downward, the officers grasp at silver bullet solutions, perhaps even a radical new cap’n. By the end of the night the “unsinkable” lies broken on the ocean floor anyway.

He diagnosed five phases of mighty falling:

Arrogance / Hubris — “We are just not the kind of outfit that could ever sink without a trace... anyway, our troubles are basically down to other people.”

Sense of entitlement — “We have a right to carry on in our own way, regardless of what others think... Here’s to us — who’s like us?”

Denial of risk and peril — “After all, more people go to Church than footie...”

Game is up — “but with a really big new idea/ initiative/ leader we can still make it...”

Child of God by adoption and grace, husband of Lucy, father of five, jumped-up vicar (Area Bishop of Buckingham).
Born Edinburgh. Deacon 1979, Priest 1980, Bishop 2003. Cambridge MA, Oxford DPhil — ‘I am a doctor, but not the kind that helps people.’ I trained for ordained ministry at Wycliffe Hall. I have worked in various C of E contexts, urban and suburban, as well as in prison.